Tuesday, March 26, 2013

The American Political Science Association is still issuing alarmist statements about Congress voting to defund political science research along the lines of the rhetoric that inspired me to write "Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters," an opinion piece published in the New York Times Sunday Review on June 24, 2012.

I have never endorsed the Congressional proposals to defund political science research, but in the June opinion piece, and in other correspondence and posts on this blog, I have argued that the apoplexy about this is irrational; that our country would be better served by funding priorities other than those currently used by NSF grant adjudicators; and that the APSA needs to have an open conversation about the criteria we believe are reasonable for assessing grant proposals, including entertaining the possibility that distributing research funding at random to proposals that are coherent and have sound budgets might be a strategy most likely to yield robust research agendas and knowledge that isn't just a hot finding for a few years and then displaced by the next election or war or spurious correlation announced as a breakthrough in discovering a new causal mechanism.

A colleague this morning brought to my attention that Sen. Tom Coburn quoted from the Times article in his floor speech in support of defunding the discipline. He is not a very good reader. I wrote:

To shield research from disciplinary biases of the moment, the government should finance scholars through a lottery: anyone with a political science Ph.D. and a defensible budget could apply for grants at different financing levels. And of course government needs to finance graduate student studies and thorough demographic, political and economic data collection. I look forward to seeing what happens to my discipline and politics more generally once we stop mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.

Still, I understood when I wrote the opinion piece that it might be misused in exactly the way Coburn misused it and decided that these consequences and any debate about this would be preferable to business-as-usual.
For that discussion to occur, however, requires that the APSA stop worrying about protecting democracy in Congress and start practicing it in our own organization. What follows is a letter I sent via email this morning to Jane Mansbridge, President, APSA and Michael Brintnall, Executive Director, APSA.Dear Professor Mansbridge and Mr. Brintall,
I hope this finds you well. I am writing because a colleague just
brought to my attention that Senator Tom Coburn cited in his floor
speech last week an opinion piece I wrote last summer in which I
questioned whether quantitative political science research of the sort
prioritized by the NSF contributes to knowledge about politics. As a result of that piece not appearing on the APSA NSF page alongside
other opinion pieces about the NSF controversy, including another piece
critical of NSF funding, I was in correspondence over the summer with
Mr. Brintnall and Professor Powell about how how they had ascertained
that the position statements coming out of the APSA actually were
representing the interests of its membership.

The response was that they had no specific authorization from either the
Council nor the membership for these statements and were issuing them on
the basis of previous commitments that also had no specific
authorization from the APSA membership or Council. Professor Powell
indicated that there would be a discussion of the APSA relation to the
NSF, including input on funding criteria, at the Council meeting in New
Orleans.

That meeting was cancelled and I am wondering if the Council has
actually discussed the statements issued in our name. I am especially
concerned about the language in your March 15, 2013 letter echoing
previous statements offering our colleagues' services to so-called
national security and defense interests. Senator Coburn seems to have
taken you up on this. I am wondering on what basis you decided to
emphasize our colleagues' availability for this research, and not, say,
research on how vague nativist national security anxieties such as those
invoked by your letter undermine the rule of law, not to mention
rational research priorities.

Senator Coburn affirmed one part of my argument but then contradicted
himself by creating an exception to the ban on NSF funding for political
science if it is used to advance the national security or economic
interests of the United States. If political scientists are bad at
producing useful knowledge, the part of my argument Coburn affirms, then
it seems illogical to rely on these dart-throwing monkey equivalents in
areas about which Coburn prioritizes. However, alas, this is exactly the
exception emphasized in your open letter.

Your open letter to senators also states that our "discipline [is]
devoted to learning how to make democracies work better" and you mention
your concern that the passage of this measure would be an "embarrassment
for the world's exemplary democracy." In light of the fact that you are
advancing positions without following a single recognized procedure of
representative democracy these lofty sentiments seem hypocritical and
absurd. The Senate openly debated and voted on a measure and amendment
ascertaining the relationship between the NSF and our discipline. I am
aware of no deliberative or decision-making procedures that have been
followed pursuant to establishing a position on NSF funding for our own
organization. Instead, the President and Executive Director in 2012 and
2013 appear to have been simply issuing these statements by fiat.

We do not need NSF funding to bring democracy to our own organization.
Why not a moderated digital conversation under the aegis of the APSA
about the priorities we would seek of the NSF funding of political
science? What about actually being the democratic change and using
tools for digital democracy among our own membership?

In short, the APSA is a membership organization but follows no
procedures for ascertaining its best interests much less for
representing these to the public. Without this, the claims you make on
behalf of political scientists as saviors of democratic values lack any
integrity. Instead of presenting your membership as eager to lick up
the scraps alongside the trough of the country's militarist, homeland
security funding, why not treat us as serious intellectuals who may be
driven by intellectual curiosity and ideals of creativity, justice,
freedom, peace, and, yes, democracy?

I am copying this to the Council Secretary John Green and am requesting
that he distribute this to the current Council members (not all of them
have their email addresses available online). I understand it is
possible that there has been some conversation among them and look
forward to having these views more openly distributed and a range of
positions on important questions such as the government funding for our
discipline more systematically deliberated.

According to documents released to me under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge established a 60 day case completion goal for 85% of detained respondents and increased from 3 to 21 days the time that people may be held pending bond hearings. (The "redeterminations" refer to the immigration judges' initial bond hearings to evaluate the conditions of release set by the Department of Homeland Security, not reassessments of bonds set by the immigration courts.)

(The full release of this data includes analysis by immigration court and will be available here by zip file this weekend.)

Taking these data at face value, the government is funding the capacity to lock people up at a level greater than the capacity to provide the admittedly limited review for these custody decisions.

O'Leary's response to this is to sell out the rights of those on the EOIR docket. Rather than release them because it is unconstitutional to hold people indefinitely without an independent review of their custody status, O'Leary is playing the role of the good bureaucrat and expanding the time frame for incarcerations so that it accommodates the rate of DHS lockups.

The case completion data also are troubling. On the basis of their own data, 18% of people locked up have been waiting for their cases to have final decisions in a time frame we know is beyond 60 days.

Finally, it is not clear that the tracking information is accurately reflecting what is happening on the ground. Each time a respondent moves from one immigration judge to another, the clock starts over for the EOIR tracking data. For instance, when the EOIR violated Esteban Tiznado's due process rights by hand picking a former Office of Immigration Litigation employee to hear Tiznado's case in its Falls Church headquarters, instead of leaving it with the case load of Sylvia Arellano in Florence, Arizona, the clock would start over and the initial decision against Tiznado issued almost seven months after he was most recently detained would show up as being issued in the time frame from when his case was redocketed.

We know from the recent response to the budget sequestration that when the funds are short, the DHS will release people it would otherwise detain. If the DHS will do this because it lacks funds for housing people, then the DOJ should do this as well, when it lacks funds for protecting their due process rights. If the EOIR cannot because of budget shortfalls staff the immigration courts at a level sufficient to protect respondents' constitutional rights, then O'Leary needs to instruct his IJs to order their release, not reset goals to accommodate indefinite detention.

About Me

Professor,
Political Science Department, Northwestern University.
I teach political theory and write about law-breaking by ICE and the immigration courts for The Nation magazine.
My book States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. It explores alternatives to our current laws that base citizenship on parochial, unjust ideas about birth, and shows how these laws are connected to other archaic practices inconsistent with liberalism, including inheritance and marriage.
My first book was Reproducing the State (Princeton, 1999).
For contact and other information, please go to jacquelinestevens.org.